shadowprofile77

what about listed saves of previous sessions like suspender offered?

Aside from being a great look at the back hand of the make money online world, this was comic gold. Bravo. I laughed right out loud several times.

Can't say much for hospital inmates but, bear in mind that friars in medieval Europe often had their days filled with plenty of hard physical labour as well, and often tended to farm plots for the benefit of their monasteries and church lands with lots of their own sweaty work. It was not what we would today consider a sedentary job at all. Though yes, a labourer would have been much more likely to suffer injuries regardless... One good fictional account of medieval life among all classes: Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follet. Wonderful reading and realistically depicted in most ways.

I agree with the general reasoning of what you say but in this case (and some others we could name) I'm tempted to call it a form of protest even. Basically letting them know that: "Your product is good enough that I respect it, but i think i'm justified in working around the way you've set up payment for it through so many dishonest dark patterns that some of them might arguably even be illegal themselves. So fix yourselves a bit first before acting like the only victims".

This entire notion of respecting DRM to such an extent is absurd. If you buy a kindle book from Amazon, regardless of legal details, it's fairly "yours" and just as is the case with a physical book, you should have the right and inclination to strip off its DRM and then use it across devices as you please, even send a copy or two to friends. The right because you bought it, just like you'd have once bought a paper book, and the inclination because as we've seen with many cases of sealed digital content "ownership" platforms in the past, buyers have a funny way of suddenly losing everything they supposedly own. Stripping DRM removes both problems completely and, yes, it's usually very easy to do using perfectly legal software like Calibre, for example.

Yet later, all the complaining when one uses pirated versions of their products. A company that behaves in these ways flatly deserves no consideration when choosing to simply use pirated editions of their software. Many people are way too forgiving of what should be considered blatantly shitty behavior by vendors yet heap blame on those who don't pay "fairly" for using the same company's products.

Yet they still pushed through the atrocious, worthless Munich agreement that so completely eviscerated Czechoslovakia, despite knowing not only that the Nazi war machine had no realistic hope of major conquest against fully intact Czech territory, but also that the High command of the Wehrmacht itself was near mutiny at the idea of trying such a thing. Had Chamberlain simply shown more spine at that point, there very likely never would have been a genocidal Nazi conquest of Europe. I know that the what-ifs of history are full of unknown unknowns but given what did happen, It's hard to imagine a rejection of German demands in 1938 possibly having lead to as bad, let alone worse..

Wrote this before even reading the article linked (bad habit) and it nicely backs up some of the above, especially about Czechoslovakia. The article's points about the superior strength of the German army in 1939 are good but again, with the German forces occupied in Poland, a French offensive in that same year during the Polish campaign would have been a catastrophe for the Germans even if the French were inferior on some military specs.

Germany got extraordinarily lucky at many points between 1938 and 1941 (just prior to Barbarossa), but two of its most decisive lucky breaks happened in 1939 and 1938.

First break: in 1938 when Hitler was essentially gifted the Sudetenland by the Munich accords and by the inaction in an absurdly limp response from the Czech government. This particular region of Czechoslovakia was deeply protected by heavy military defenses and these in turn were backed up by a strong army run by a country that was (though it may seem a bit strange today) at the time one of the more robust and sophisticated industrial powers in Europe. Had the Czechoslovak government simply said "No, if you want it, you'll have to fight for it", Hitler's army would have likely suffered catastrophic losses invading the Sudeten region in 1938 and its entire later drive to conquest would have been ruined before it even really began. Instead, Beneš and Prime Minister Milan Hodža caved to pressure from Chamberlin and from Hitler as well, and lost their single best chunk of protective territory (not to mention the sheer morale loss that this entailed. From then, it was a simple thing to swallow the rest of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, further reinforcing the German war drive and industrial power. Had Hitler attempted to actually fight for the Sudetenland in 1938, his own generals knew that the Wehrmacht was still completely unfit for such an undertaking and they believed this to the point of being on the verge of a military coup attempt had it come to war. This was all (for Hitler) very luckily nullified by the completely counterproductive Munich agreement. Hitler came out of that looking like a political genius when in reality he was a frustrated fool who had desperately wanted war over the Sudeten region instead of diplomatic victory, despite it being a terribly bad idea.

Next, the lucky break of 1939: Yes, the German army was superbly equipped and armed by September of that year, but it was materially and numerically inferior to that of the French forces. Thus, when Hitler sent the vast majority of his forces into Poland in September, the only thing protecting Germany in the west was a thin screen of scant divisions along the border with France. Had France actually had the drive and political will to take its declaration of war in defense of Poland seriously and energetically, it could have mobilized fully and sent the full force of 40 divisions that the country's already prepared, ready, fully deployable "Saar Offensive" plan called for into the heart of western Germany. Doing this while Hitler was busy with Poland, in mid September would have been a catastrophe for the Germans, and would have completely ruined later plans to invade France. Instead, the French only advanced 30 divisions TO the Saar border, did essentially nothing more, and shortly afterwards, once the Polish campaign was over, Germany quickly reinforced this region with its own offensive action in October, 1939, causing the French to pull back completely. What an enormously wasted opportunity for boosting morale and war footing ahead of the game and crushing obvious future German aggression.

Sounds interesting, and I coyld definitely use something better than my filed, chaotic bookmarks to organize my collection of websites. The problem with this though? The same one that so many other systems for long term data organization can have: How do I know your service won't just die or fold sooner or later, leaving me and my organization efforts swinging in the wind? Bookmarks at least are just HTML files that can be exported, saved and imported across all browsers regardless of platform. Simple, resilient and thus robust.

cough.. torrent it... cough.

That piece of reporting by Friedman is simply grotesque.. How a journalist for a major paper like the Times could not only let himself be so visibly bamboozled by a murderous, corrupt autocrat like this particular prince but openly describe how he's being greased up for good PR and then call it straight reporting is laughable. Looks like some NY Times reporters keep the old Walter Duranty tradition safely alive. despicable.

Wait, what? You mean there's no way to store data in an external HD that's secure from solar storms under concrete or metal shielding? Or simply keep simultaneous cloud backups on more than one part of the world's surface? You could probably just find a cloud service that offers both shielding and multi-locational backups. For many people, even ordinary people, printing out even their personal data, never mind photos, would be absurdly difficult.

I would argue that if anything, in our current world of privacy and anonymity-indifferent lawyers, regulators, policy makers, corporate heads and most members of the general public, things like this and the hackers behind them perform a sort of obscene public service in a way: They make everyone at least somewhat leery about trends towards so much of our private lives falling into too many databases, especially when said data is highly personal, financial, medical or location-based (and thus especially compromising in certain contexts)

The reason why? While lawmakers, politicians and corporate heads couldn't give less of a shit about the average joe's privacy, they know that it's increasingly difficult even for them and their own families to stay private from too-pervasive, intrusive data collection, and they also now see ever more often just how near impossible it is to make said data stay secure from mass public leaks. Oops... Their own "optimization" obsessed nosiness maybe biting them back bit by bit.

It would be perversely amusing to see the head of some bullshit ad tracking firm, or bottom-feeding user data reseller, or the head of a snooping social network have their own dirty laundry leaked all over the web for all to see.

There should never exist a rubric known as "things you do not discuss" in any society that takes open debate and free expression seriously. Discussion is not violence and it should always be defended as a freedom regardless of how boorish or controversial its subjects. The very idea of such a category is grotesque and cowardly, to start.

Nope, for one thing, the country I live in never implemented anything resembling strict lockdown measures (there were some restrictions on opening hours for businesses, types of businesses that could open and car traffic in city centers) and for another thing, at all times, even during the time least welcoming to going out, I made sure to simply go for solitary walks in parks, streets and public areas while avoiding any crowds. I know that in some countries (disgracefully in my view) even leaving home for a solitary walk or with family you live with anyhow was forbidden, but where it isn't anyone who's been feeling more than a bit claustrophobic should sincerely just go out and get some air on a regular basis. It is possible to do this without overly exposing yourself, and it can be done in the company of any people you in any case might share your home and intimate air with.

That was deliciously creepy...Reminded me a bit of this

http://www.scpwiki.com/top-rated-pages-this-month

Bullshit. A great number of those protesting on the left/progressive side during the fairly recent BLM marches were peaceful people legitimately angry about police violence, but more than enough others used the same starting point as a launch pad for mass riots, burnings, lootings and the promotion of extremist (but leftist extremist) political postures that were little different in their love of overthrowing legitimate institutions from anything recently done by the idiots at the Capitol. In terms of sheer scale and distribution, the former protests had much more violence to them than more recent right-oriented protests. Emotional attachment to a certain ideology is no excuse for claiming two obviously related things "ain't even the same fucking sport". They very much are, but from different teams.

Oh my gosh, pirated!? You don't say!? I mean, how awful having workarounds of the entirely fair, completely balanced and decent system of laws that currently govern copyright in the U.S and much of the world....

Just as I thought: A test that bases its effectiveness on occult fecal blood will obviously stumble around the very common phenomenon of hemorrhoids, and only a colonoscopy can clarify better. On the other hand, if no blood is detected, there still exists the possibility of polyps or tumor growth which have not recently or yet started to release blood, making this test more than a bit unreliable as a measure of something that could be life or death.

And how would this test avoid false scares caused by hemorrhoids? They also can create blood in human stool.

The rubrics you describe basically cover a whole spectrum of people who also fit into the millennial category, and in my experience they're among the most easily, absurdly offended and politically correct people in modern society... I have more hope for younger generations than them.

If it was describing that as "worse", didn't leave it very clear, and in any case, that's an awfully ambiguous comparison. Death from influenza was slowly asphyxiating, and sometimes even hemorrhagic, neither of which sound especially peaceful.

I believe that it's considerably worse than 1918.

The COVID IFR is known to be lower than that of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people in less than a year, and pulled that off at a time when the Earth's population was a quarter of what it is today and much less mobile. I have no idea whatsoever where you get the idea that COVID is worse than 1918. It most emphatically (at least so far) is not at all showing itself to be as bad, let alone worse.

Truly, how the hell can they even justify such a posture, or how do employees not spit it back in their faces? I can see these (presumably tech) companies having a claim for IP if it was partly created through company resources, but having a rightful claim on anything that you as an employee do in your spare time while an employee? That's reprehensible and grotesquely absurd.

My day job is at a boutique consulting company that explicitly allows side projects in our employment contract. It helps a ton if your employer allows it. Seems like it might be hard to come by employers who do this though.

Really? This is normal? I find it extremely bizarre and not to mention shitty that an employer should somehow have any say whatsoever about what you do for economic or personal gain in your free personal time. You're not a piece of property and never should be controlled to this degree no matter the nature of your work.

To my knowledge, Paypal continues to randomly and often very opaquely freeze people's funds for months at a time or longer, so if you have a link to this FTC ruling, im honestly curious to see it.

So let me get this straight. Weeks of protests which started against racism and police brutality but in many places degenerated into mass looting and burning of whole buildings (often in both cases having no connection to perpetrators of violence against minorities) gets swept under the rug as justified social anger and legitimate social protest (not to mention the medical community performing clinical contortions to keep itself on the woke side of things despite its previous criticisms of those who were irresponsible in not socially distancing in public) But this bunch of people deserve lengthy prison sentences, all the hate that can be tossed on them and every nasty thought it's possible to generate?

Talk about absurd double standards. No fan of Trump and these protestors strike me as idiotic, but if you're going to hate on them this much, it's worth analyzing why other fairly recent protests somehow deserved a free pass because of their supposed social justice credentials...

That shows you how little value these services actually provide to most people. The remaining users wouldn't pay for year two, because to many others would have left the platform.

No, I'm extremely critical of many aspects of Facebook (and implicitly Whatsapp as an FB property, especially now) but to say they provide so little value based on how few people would possibly pay these amounts uses flawed assumptions. If people didn't pay it wouldn't be because they don't gain at least 1 or 2 dollars in value (many people almost certainly do, I certainly do with my own use), it would be because the model of offering high value for free in exchange for massive amounts of saleable user data is so lucrative that alternatives with free versions would quickly take over market share. In absolute terms, the use value of FB or Whatsapp to a user is often much more than 1 dollar per month, but compared to the ease of switching to someone who in the existing market again offers the same for free, it could quickly descend to less than 1 dollar.

Yet, here you are, a relatively anonymous individual of whose talents, accomplishments or level of education we can't be sure, happily spewing out your own completely unsubstantiated opinion, essentially indistinguishable from garbage, to a reading public on a major news aggregation site.